Overview
The management consultancy business of Capita provided a full business solution (staff, organisation, processes, procedures, buildings and logistics) for the resourcing division of Capita that would enable the supply of approximately 25,000 staff to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for the 2011 census. The resourcing division was responsible for the recruitment of census employees, but they did not have the scaled up solution, procedures or logistics in place to recruit such large numbers of personnel in short timescales. To support this project, the consultancy business provided business architecture support to:
- Produce and maintain a resource model
- Produce and manage recruitment business architecture
- Manage the process analyst deliverables
- Programme governance meetings.
To support the business architecture MI reports, recruitment procedures and recruitment processes and variants were designed and produced to ensure that a recruitment solution was in place to recruit 25,000 employees to conduct the 2011 census.
Challenges and goals
At a high level the ONS and Capita resourcing required:
- Recruitment processes and variants
- Recruitment procedures
- MI Reporting structure.
Challenges included tight deadlines, a key member of the census team resigning halfway through the workshops, and the need to recruit over 20,000 individuals against tight timescales.
Capita's approach
Having first defined and agreed the objectives and terms of reference with the ONS and Capita, the first step was to design MI reports for recruitment. The aims of MI for census 2011 were to highlight progress to meeting the targets within each stage of the recruitment process and to provide information so that candidates can be processed in batches.
Workshops were held with key recruitment managers to produce a list of reports required to support operational processing, the data required and who will receive them. This was then extended into reports to include exception or standard reports, business rules for what to do with the information in the report and frequency of reports and distribution.
Multiple workshops were held with the Capita recruitment team to clarify the detail around recruitment processes and to go into the fine detail of the end to end recruitment process. Once this information gathering was complete, the processes were drafted and then reviewed with the client.
These processes were then used as a basis for creating recruitment procedures which would give detailed instructions to resourcing consultants in how to complete their tasks, how to deal with candidate application queries and how to escalate issues. Recruitment procedures were presented to the Capita recruitment senior management team and were also created in HTML format to allow easy online access for users.
Results and benefits
We ensured that all recruitment processes and procedures were approved and signed off by the client against tight deadlines.
As a result of the development of recruitment processes and procedures, a list of over 90 additional products were created as a foundation for additional work to be developed in the future.
“I just wanted to say that I appreciate the hard work you put into the scaling up project. It is of great value to the recruitment workstream and an excellent job was delivered”.
John Wissett, census programme manager
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